


Bedroom Hymns

by E_Salvatore



Series: Tagged: TBTP Tumblr Fics [16]
Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Tumblr Fic, harmless demons who just wanna find their soulmates, mentions of demonic possession, okay not so harmless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 10:58:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6421072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Salvatore/pseuds/E_Salvatore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite">remembertowrite</a>, who sent me <a href="http://remembertowrite.tumblr.com/post/141705228243/remembertowrite-putthepromptsonpaper-would">this prompt</a>:</p>
<p>  <i>"Would it be so terrible? To not hate ending up with me?"</i></p>
<p> Title courtesy of Florence + The Machine's song of the same name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedroom Hymns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [remembertowrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/gifts).



**IV**

 

His ears should not be so attuned to the sound of bare feet padding across carpeted floors, but he finds himself pulled back into the waking world as soon as her feet hit the ground. She makes her way across the room and reaches blindly for the switch until a sharp _click_ echoes off the walls and floods the bathroom with warm light. Beams of it spill past the threshold; even without his glasses, he can make out her silhouette as she lingers in the doorway for a brief moment.

_Just a short trip to the bathroom,_ he assures the voice in the back of his mind, the one that rebels against even the slightest bit of distance from its mate. _She’ll be back. They’ll be back._ Reason and past experience tell the voice that he has nothing to fear. Another _click_ , this time of a lock sliding into place. Alex shuts him out and takes all the light with her; darkness curls around him, drags him back into a dreamless sleep.

The next time he wakes, it’s far too bright. Her side of the bed is almost hot to the touch; warmed by sunlight yet devoid of her presence. The voice rages against him, roars and growls while it still can. It grows weaker with every passing second; she must be on the move.

There’s no carefully folded sheet of paper on her pillow, nothing like the handwritten notes he leaves her when he’s the one doing the running. She texts him an hour later, once she’s safely past the gate and minutes away from boarding.

_Heading back to Seattle. Stay away for as long as you can._

**I**

 

In retrospect, of course it was always going to happen like this: with Alex mad at him, pissed at her producers and downright furious at herself; with him torn between ending their professional relationship and promising to be a more attentive friend; with the two of them snapping and accusing and yelling; with her pushing him away and him pulling her along and the both of them stumbling – blindly, a mess of half-undone shirts and half-articulated feelings - into her bedroom.

It’s what comes after that he could never have seen coming.

“Alex,” He says calmly, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Alex,” He repeats more forcefully when she keeps chanting, her back to him. “Alex!” He finally snaps, pulling her around to face him.

The moon is half-full tonight, and clouds conspire to keep the night dark as can be. But what little moonlight there is seems to hit them just right, a spotlight trained upon Alex’s glassy, unfocused eyes and her rapidly moving lips. Her chant is feverish now, so fast the words spill out in shortened exhales and end on sharp inhales as her lungs prepare for the next repeated verse.

Shaking her does no good. Raising his voice just adds to the chaos. Kissing her does not break the spell.

Alex comes out of it on her own, shrugs off the trance slowly. Her lips slow down, her voice grows faint and then finally, _finally_ , her gasp for air marks the end, not another start. She blinks and her eyes snap into focus. Her forehead creases in confusion for a split-second; he’s forgotten that they haven’t done this before, that he doesn’t wake up every night to hold her steady while her small frame shudders as it tries to keep up with her rapid-fire chanting.

“Nic was right,” She whispers into the night as the moon retreats, making way for the darkest moments before dawn. “It was _me._ ” The truth stares them in the face, and he can think of no lie to comfort her, no words loud enough to drown out the faint echoes of demon names as they bounce off the walls of her bedroom.

In the morning, she’s the one to chalk it up to sleep-deprivation and stress and letting Gloria Coen get to her. “Apophenia,” She suggests with a laugh, her eyes begging him to play along.

“Apophenia _,_ ” He agrees, and they put that – along with the events that had resulted in him being in her bed at 3:43 in the morning, half-dressed and desperately trying to break her sleeping curse with a kiss – behind them.

 

**III**

 

“We can’t keep doing this,” Alex sighs as she rolls off him, landing on her back. He chances a quick look at her; her eyes are resolutely fixed upon the ceiling, hands clasped over her stomach, fingers laced together so tightly that his own hands twinge with phantom pain.

In the back of his mind, the voice settles down, finally appeased – for now. Judging by the relaxed set of Alex’s shoulders, her companion has probably quieted down as well. Not for long, though – never for long. Especially not with the two of them in such close proximity. The others feed on each other, feast on the intimacy their hosts share and demand more _more **more**_. “I don’t think it’s up to us to decide,” He reminds her.

She frees her hands of their painful knot and moves one up to tangle in her own hair, combing through it at first, pulling at it after that. “We have to do _something_! I don’t even remember going to the airport, much less getting on a plane to Chicago. I – _she_ dropped everything to come here, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself. Who knows what it’ll be the next time. What if these two decide to make it official one day and we wake up in Vegas the next morning? Are you prepared to let it get that far?”

He sets aside the ludicrous thought of demons eloping in Vegas for now; the voice remains silent, but he wouldn’t want to give it any ideas. There’s a more pressing matter at hand, anyway. 

They’ve never talked about it – not from Alex’s perspective, at least. He knows how her mother feels about marriage, but not her own thoughts on the matter. It’s not like he goes around asking his colleagues and friends how they feel about getting married, and she’s only recently left behind those labels to become something else entirely, something he wasn’t even given the privilege of figuring out before they had new labels forced upon them: _demons, vessels, mates._

If things had gone differently, if their lives weren’t something straight out of a horror movie… Strand wonders. He wonders if they’d still be in this bed together, wonders if they would’ve been able to look each other in the eye after that first night, wonders if Alex would’ve chosen to elope to avoid her mother fussing over every single detail about the wedding.

But that isn’t her decision to make anymore. Nothing about them is theirs to decide.

“Would it be so terrible?” He asks, quietly resigning himself to their fate. “To not hate ending up with me?” This isn’t him – this isn’t how the stubborn, headstrong, determined Richard Strand was supposed to fall – but he is so _tired_. Tired of fighting his own mind, tired of gritting his teeth to bear through the physical pain their separation causes him, tired of the constant struggle to separate the voice’s desires from his own _(talk about splitting hairs,_ a voice snorts. It sounds strangely like his assistant, and he quickly shuts that out before things can get worse inside his already-crowded mind). Things could have been a lot worse. He has a _demon_ in his head and so far, all it wants is to be with Alex. He can live with this – but only if she can.

Alex turns to rest on her side, and he mirrors her so that they’re eye-to-eye. “That’s not…” She sighs. “It’s not about that. _Us_. It’s not about us. But to just- to let them-” Her voice wavers; when she inhales, it is a shaky, shuddering thing. “When I leave this room, a part of me will be screaming for you. And I hate that I can never tell how much of that is me and how much of that is  _her_.”

He doesn’t tell her that it’s the same for him, _can’t_ tell her that he’s already given up on telling the difference, that he’s given up altogether. He doesn’t tell her that he sees the years stretching ahead of them and the world narrowing down to this bedroom, to the _~~four~~ _ two of them. It’s tainted, this future he sees for them.

And he – it – _they_ want it.

 

**II**

 

He has a plane to catch in three hours, and his hotel is on the other end of town. If he leaves now, he might just have enough time for a shower before he hurriedly shoves everything into his bags and rushes to the airport. If traffic is light, he might even be able to sit down and have a nice, quiet breakfast at the airport.

Of course, this entire plan is contingent on him leaving within the next ten minutes. It all goes down the drain the minute Alex starts murmuring. She’s quiet at first, harsh whispers under her breath that he almost mistakes for labored breathing. He pulls her close, cradles her to his chest and smooths down her hair, offers up whispers of his own in a fruitless attempt to draw her attention.

Her voice grows stronger, her verses more complex. Left to his own devices while waiting for her to snap herself out of it, he decides to pay closer attention to her words and see if he can make out anything familiar. At first, it’s a jumble of words he has never, ever come across in all his years, all his research. A few minutes later, he can’t tell if they’re familiar to him because of his line of work, or due to her constant repetition. And then, suddenly –

Suddenly, he understands every single word and a voice in the back of his mind (a voice he hasn’t heard in _decades_ , a voice he’d convinced himself had only ever existed in nightmares) is feeding him lines of his own in the strange tongue. He hears his own voice respond to hers, the words slipping from his mind and past his lips.

When she peeks up from his chest to catch his eye, nothing about her smirk or her eyes or her voice is her own. “Welcome back.”

But that’s alright, because he isn’t quite himself either.  

 

**V**

 

As it turns out, _as long as you can_ is no more than nine days. He shows up on her doorstep at two in the morning, pulling her close even as he apologizes and tells her he shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t let him in, they shouldn’t-

She leads the way to her bedroom, doesn’t bother with lights or words or even a token effort to deny the four of them what they’re here for.

Later, he wakes to the sound of her voice calling for him. She sounds so far away, so gentle as she tells him goodbye. He follows her voice and squints to make out a figure standing by the door; there’s something in her hand, something big enough to present itself as a sizable blur to his eyes.

A bag, he realizes with a start. The voice begins to stir as he finally focuses on Alex’s words.

“-to try, at least. I need to know what our limits are. Please don’t follow me. And don’t bother Nic; he doesn’t know where I’m going. No one knows. But I’ll check in with him daily, and he’ll let you know the minute he doesn’t hear from me.”

By the time he reaches for his glasses on the nightstand, it’s too late.

“It’s for the best, Richard,” She tells him, and he slips on his glasses just in time to catch the look in her eyes before she turns her back on him. That one glimpse of her is enough to hold him back, to fight against the demon’s frantic attempts to send him running after her.

He manages to give her a ten-minute head-start. By the time he’s crawled and clawed his way to the living room, she’s put enough distance between them to let him regain full control over his own body. The voice rages, growls, _howls_ at him desperately, almost pathetically.

_Get up get out go after her chaseherdownpullherbackdragherhomekeepher **keepherKEEPHER**_

Something suspiciously akin to pride warms him as Alex puts more and more distance between them with every passing minute, as the voice grows fainter with every passing second.

By sunrise, there is only his own voice to keep him company in this cold, empty apartment he knows almost as well as his own.

There is only his own voice, begging him to _get up get out go after her chaseherdownpullherbackdragherhomekeepher **keepherKEEPHER**_

**Author's Note:**

> As always: thanks for reading, sorry for the angst and feel free to shout at me in the comments.


End file.
